Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade Review: Legend of Parrying

Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade, a tale of the legend that spans 300 years apart, in a world where demons and humans have decided to coexist, but not everything is as smooth sailing as it sounds. Bringing forth an inevitable war and a demon lord, this tale will test your skills to the max.

Released on May 15, 2025, Yasha: Legends of Demon Blade is developed by 7Quark and published alongside Game Source Entertainment. Available now on Steam, PS5, and the Nintendo Switch. With that, let’s dive right into our review of Yasha: Legends of Demon Blade at Gameffine.

The Canon Storyline

In a fresh new attempt in the roguelike space, Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade can be played by 3 different protagonists that you can pick at the start of the game. Each of these protagonists has their own storyline, which changes your role and the outcome of the story itself. This gives the game a big shot at replayability as the weapons also differ for these characters, along with their special abilities.

Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade is all about the war between humans and demons in the Edo era, where nothing but mass bloodshed was afoot in all lands. But something changed, and a phenomenon occurred called the blood moon. This event gave birth to a legendary demon known as the nine-tailed, which then went on to wreak havoc across lands. After an elaborate fight with the legendary samurai of the Konpeki clan, the demon was eradicated until things changed again.

300 years later, the humans and the demons started living alongside, but the blood moon made a cold-hearted comeback, once again wreaking havoc on peaceful communities. This is where you enter, as any protagonist of your choice. Shigure, being the canon, the fate of humanity lies in your skills and determination to grow stronger.

Should you decide to play with the other two characters, you can still find a very interesting storyline that perfectly blends with canon, with many cute and witty moments alongside your gameplay experience.

The Demon Blade’s Wrath

For all that it’s worth, you don’t want to play with the first sword that is issued to you, called the ‘Nameless’. Although it’s revered to be special and mysterious, and will make more sense in the later acts of the game.

Addressing the elephant in the room, the mechanics of this roguelike game are not something out of the blue, and are very generic to what you usually expect in a roguelike game. You can have all this in an easier version of Hades, with fresh new enemies. But that does not mean this game is not enjoyable; it’s quite the opposite. The game wants you to focus on parries that lead to a special finisher if the time is right. Because this finisher can be performed an unlimited number of times, this eventually becomes very fluid because there is no limit to the parry finisher that you can perform.

You can use four different approaches to attack – Light, Heavy, Dash, and Dodge Combo. Mix-matching all of these can be essential to increase your range of attacks, but it all comes down to how well you block your attacks. Perfect blocks allow you to parry your attacks as well. Supercharging your parries gives you an ultimate ability that deals a massive amount of damage, perfect for taking out a group of enemies or a strong Yokai.

The game’s biggest feature is the wide range of weapon arsenals. You can visit the local demon blacksmith who has a wide range of swords ready to be forged. Each has their abilities and playstyle, vividly getting perfect sync with how you want to play the game. My favourite weapon turned out the be the red crane, which only dealt heavy attacks. This weapon can also be further stacked with crane points, dealing even more damage, or converting the stack into a damage multiplier for the ultimate attack.

I paired this weapon with a fire-type sword that unleashes a fire ring on charge attacks or combo finishers, stacking a 100 DPS, which turned out to be an extremely game-changing combo, making my fights from ACT 2 to ACT 3 a simple breeze.

Inside the game, just like every other roguelite, you get perk points, which you can stack up to three levels in three different slots of each of your swords. Therefore, six abilities, with eighteen upgrades. You also have a chance of collecting health items, giving a big edge inside levels, but at the same time, you’re collecting currency coins and soul orbs. These coins can then be spent on rest points in various places – Ability Shop, Blessing Shop and Ramen Shop. Blessings and Ramen, if used well, can give you that final push to get through the end of the run.

All of this together makes a perfect, relaxing, challenging, and enjoyable roguelite experience.

The Lands Ravaged by Demons

The quality of the game is really excellent for an indie game. The variety of enemies, details on the protagonist and the battle animations are very fluid and vivid. The level design is also interesting; it gives a lot of space for you to use your abilities, but still manages to elaborate describe the place you’re fighting in the terrain.

The OSTs and SFX, and voice-overs are also put together really well. You can find a very decent dubbing experience that perfectly puts the emotions and humour into the narrative.

The combat animations, which are very fast and effective mostly bug-free. We didn’t encounter any graphics or game-breaking bugs while playing on two different systems on the Steam Deck.

Final Word

Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade is an excellent combination of a good roguelite experience with an increasingly interesting narrative. The game picks up after ACT 1, and makes the game tenfold better with abilities, difficulty and the narrative depth. This indie game has perfectly hit all the marks for being a very enjoyable roguelike game, and hits it out of the park for its replayability options.